Climate ChangeComments Off on Global Warming my arse! June was freezing here in the UK!

Jul222016

How accurate is our perception of recently experienced weather and temperature? For those of us in the UK (and some parts of Europe) June 2016 was cold and miserable right?

I was prompted to write this article in response to a comment I received to one of my posts on Facebook. In the post I quoted a paragraph from a recent NOAA article:

The June 2016 mean temperature across the United Kingdom was 13.9°C (57.0°F) or 0.9°C (1.6°F) above the 1981–2010 average. The warmer-than-average value was mainly driven by extremely warm nighttime temperatures. The nation’s averaged minimum temperature tied as the highest since national records began in 1910. Regionally, England and Wales also had the highest (or joint highest) average minimum temperature since 1910

In a similar sentiment as that expressed by my correspondent, surely this can’t be right can it? I mean we all remember 1976 as an incredibly hot summer, and there have several really warm and sunny ones since then haven’t there? In 1976 I was taking my ‘O’ level exams and people were passing out in the exam rooms!

Let’s look at what the Met Office temperature data actually tell us. I downloaded the data from here, put it into Excel and created some charts. Below is a chart of the top 30 years with the warmest average minimum temperatures in the UK for the month of June.

It can be seen that 2016 is tied equal 1st with 2003 with an average minimum temperature of 10.1 C. Interestingly, 1976 comes 3rd. Also note that 12 out of the top 30 years are since the year 2000, and 19 are since the year 1980.

Now let’s look at the average meantemperatures:

We can see that 2016 is the 14th warmest year, and 1976 is the warmest. But, even so, 14th – that’s not too far down the rankings is it? We might have expected, from our perceptions alone, that 2016 would not to make the top 30 at all!

Apart from the point that we can’t trust our perceptions or our anecdotal stories, we should not draw too many conclusions about climate change on a global scale from our narrow, regional, experiences from where we happen to live.

For a good summary of the global temperature records that are being shattered month by month see here

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Climate Change, UncategorizedComments Off on Climate Change for Dummies #4: How we know for sure that we are responsible for warming the Earth

May082016

In the first three previous parts of this series, I’ve been slowly laying out and building up the evidence. Part 1 described how we are certain that CO2 levels are rising, Part 2 explained how we are certain that we are responsible for that. Part 3 laid out the facts that tell us for sure that the Earth has been warming up in an unusual manner in recent times, and in this article I will bring it all together and present the evidence that makes us certain that human activities are the cause of this recent warming.

Just to be pedantic I have fully defined what I mean by ‘recent’ and ‘unusual’ in Part 3– but you knew that because you’ve already read every word! The first thing we need to understand is, what are the various factors that can cause the climate to change?

Climate Forcings

Climate forcings are different factors that affect the Earth’s climate. These “forcings” drive or “force” the climate system to change. The forcings can be both natural and man-made, and the natural kind can also be split into External or Internal forcings.

Natural External forcings consist of changes in the amount of radiation that we receive from the Sun. These can be from changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters, or from the variability of the Sun’s own output.

Natural Internal forcings comprise all those changes that occur within the Earth’s system itself, in particular volcanic activity, fluctuations in ocean circulations and large-scale changes in the marine and terrestrial biosphere or in the cryosphere.

Some of these natural forcings cause warming and others cause the planet to cool. If the Sun becomes more active, for example, and pours out more electromagnetic radiation, then this would warm the planet, whereas a large increase in volcanic activity causes more particles or aerosols in the atmosphere and this generally has a cooling effect.

The point is, to be able to account for the measured global warming, we must account for all of the warming and cooling effects of these forcings and add them all up; only then will we get a complete picture. The problem is when this is done with all of the natural forcings there is just no way to account for the measurements that show the recent global warming. In fact, the answer is not even close to reality.

Only when we look at the unnatural, man-made forcings do things start to agree with our observations and measurements. Additionally, when we only include man-made forcings in the models the answer is also wrong – at some periods it comes out a bit too warm. It seems that the total of the natural forcings on their own is responsible for some periods of slight recent cooling, and when added to the man-made effects the results are a near perfect match to our observations.

The chart below (from NASA GISS) shows many of the forcings. Note the very slight effect from changes in ‘Solar Irradiance’ (the Sun!). Also note the transient affect of ‘Stratospheric Aerosols’, which come from volcanoes, and are pretty well random. We are responsible for putting the majority of aerosols into the Troposphere from activities such as the burning of tropical forests, coal and oil.

To translate these values of ‘Effective Forcings’ into temperature, climate scientists run them through sophisticated climate models. When this is done we see that the calculations match the observed global temperatures beautifully. See the chart below where we see temperature anomalies against a baseline from 1850-1900 plotted against time . (HadCRUT3 is one of the datasets of global temperatures from the UK Met Office). Notice how far short the blue line, from just the natural forcings, falls from the observed truth.

The evidence is devastating. But if you want more, I like this excellent animated chart. Just keep clicking on the down arrow at the bottom of the page to get the next frame of the animation.

It is fitting that the national treasure that is Sir David Attenborough is in the news this week as he (and we) celebrate his 90th birthday. A few years ago, Sir David was a bit sceptical about how much human activities are responsible for warming the climate. He made a documentary about it in 2006 called “The Truth about Climate Change”. He paid a visit to the UK’s Met Office centre in Exeter and spoke to the climate scientists there. It was just this very topic that convinced him of the overwhelming evidence. Here’s the clip from that programme:

If you haven’t read the first two blogs, please read them first. I designed the series to build up the evidence in an incremental fashion. The articles are just below in my blog, or you can use the links below:

You’d think that this was a simple question to answer, and it is really, but there are people who dispute this fact – despite the mountains of evidence we have. In this article, I’m not going to address why the Earth is warming, but just establish the fact that it is, and also that it is doing so at an unusually fast rate.

Firstly, let’s set the time-frame that is concerning us here. We know that the climate of the Earth has changed in the past, well before we humans were capable of influencing it. Indeed, the scientific study of palaeoclimatology has revealed that climate changes that have occurred in the past have helped us understand that the ‘recent’ warming is unusual. So, what does ‘recent’ mean? In this article ‘recent’ means since about 1850.

Now that I can use the word ‘recent’ so that we all know what it means, to be able to state that the level of warming that we measure is ‘unusual’ I need to define what ‘unusual’ means. I can hear the groans of dismay from here! However, bear with me because so much is made about how the recent changes can be dismissed as simply ‘natural’, I have to set a baseline of what is natural so that we can agree that the recent warming is ‘unusual’.

Past Global Temperatures

Because we have only been using instruments to physically measure the temperature around the world for a hundred years or so, we need to use other ‘proxy’ methods. These include ice cores, tree rings, coral reefs and lake and ocean sediments amongst others. The data extracted using these proxies can be used to reconstruct various aspects of the climate, including global temperatures before instrumental records became available.

The chart in Figure 1 below is a recent version of one of the most talked about graphs in the history of science. It has been called the ‘Hockey Stick’ because the recent rapid upturn in global temperature looks like the upturned blade of a hockey stick.

Figure 1: The 1998 original Hockey Stick chart (blue), shown against a 2007 reconstruction by Wahl & Amman (red). More recent data from instruments are in black.

Michael Mann’s original 1998 version has been the subject of intense scrutiny over the years, and the denier community has done a very good job in attacking it to the point where many people think that the hockey stick is ‘broken’. However this could not be further from the truth. Several more recent reconstructions carried out independently using a variety of techniques and proxies have all verified the original findings. The denier community do this all the time – they just keep repeating a particular message again and again until it becomes fixed in the minds of the press and the public, even though it is not true. However, the scientific method keeps grinding on, and the climate scientists have concluded that the main ‘take-away’ is as follows:

The last few decades are the hottest in the last 500 to 2000 years (depending on how far back the reconstruction goes).

This answers the definition of what we mean by ‘unusual’ warming.

By the way, get used to looking at ‘anomalies’ when viewing data and charts. Just about every chart or table we look at in the field of climate science show anomalies of something, be it temperature or amount of ice loss. The anomaly values are always the difference compared to a baseline figure which will be plotted as the zero. The baseline will be a calculated average over a number of years. For example in the hockey stick chart shown above, the left axis describes the baseline as ‘Ref. 1902-1980’, and this averaged figure will appear at 0.0 on the axis. Temperatures warmer than the baseline appear above the 0.0 baseline, and cooler below.

Multiple Lines of Evidence

There are many lines of evidence that we can look at to find out if the recent warming is unusual (notice how I can use those two words now and we all know what I mean).

Direct measurements

We have global records of land and sea surface air temperatures as well as air temperatures over the oceans. Some of these temperature records go back to about 1850. You will hear a lot of nonsense from the denier community who regularly bleat on about badly placed measuring stations and urban heat island effects; but none of that detracts from the fact that all these calibrated measurements show the recent warming very clearly. I might write a separate article about the badly-placed weather stations and why it is that we know they don’t make a jot of difference.

There are several datasets of global air temperatures, and a good example is the data from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). The data in their GISSTEMP analysis comes from weather measurement stations, and you can download the raw data yourself. The chart below comes from the GISSTEMP data analyses:

Figure 2: Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present, with the base period 1951-1980. The dotted black line is the annual mean and the solid red line is the five-year mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates.

Satellite Measurements

I could put this under the ‘Direct Measurements’ section above, because satellites orbiting the Earth are equipped with sophisticated instruments that are making direct measurements of something; but they cannot directly measure temperature with a thermometer in the same way as a weather station does, or a ship which measures the temperature of the water at the surface of the ocean (often done by hauling in a bucket of water!). Satellite measurements can lead to an indirect measurement of the air temperature at various altitudes in the troposphere, but there are a lot of manipulations of the raw measurements required to do this. This is what a scientist who works with the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) satellite dataset said recently:

They [satellites] are not thermometers in space. The satellite [temperature] data … were obtained from so-called Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs), which measure the microwave emissions of oxygen molecules from broad atmospheric layers. Converting this information to estimates of temperature trends has substantial uncertainties.

However, climate change deniers, like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tx) have been holding up the RSS satellite dataset as “the best data we have”. They like to say this because the RSS data has, until recently, shown the least amount of warming in recent years. They like to say that the satellite data is more reliable than the ground based measurements which we discussed in the ‘Direct Measurements’ section above. However, there have been recent adjustments made to the RSS data which the deniers don’t like. Have a look at this video:

So, in summary, satellite measurements are valuable if correctly converted and calibrated, and they also show a warming, as shown in the chart below which is the latest RSS data which has been properly adjusted for diurnal variation (as described in the above video clip, and more information here).

Figure 3 – The global Middle Troposphere (TMT) anomalies from 1980 to now. The black line shows the old version, the light blue line the new. Note that the overall trend in the new version is 60% bigger than in the old version. The green line at the top shows the effect of the improved diurnal correction.

Just before we leave this section, it is interesting to note a denier trick to do with cherry picking the data. Take another look at the RSS data chart above, and notice the big peak around 1998 – that was due to a very big El Nino year. What people like Ted Cruz like to do is show a small section of this data where the left-hand side of the chart starts at that 1998 peak. They then draw a line through the data which appears to show cooling because the trend appears to go down, not up. This is also known as deliberately lying and abusing one’s position of authority – something that Ted Cruz seems to do on a regular basis.

Rise in Sea Level

There are two reasons why a rise in sea levels provides an indication that the world is warming. The first reason is due to the fact that water expands as it warms, and the second is the addition of extra water from melting ice caps and glaciers. But before going into any details we must again establish a baseline so that we can show that the recent rise in sea levels is ‘unusual’.

The basic summary of past sea levels goes like this: At the end of the last ice age (about 21,000 years ago), global sea levels rose 120 metres over several millennia and stabilised between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago. There is strong evidence to show that sea levels have changed very little from around AD 0 to about AD 1900. Since then there has been a marked, measured increase in global sea levels. So, the story for sea levels is very similar to the hockey stick described above for global temperatures, and it is clear to see that the recent measured rise is certainly ‘unusual’. This really is not surprising because the curve just has to follow the shape of the temperature anomaly curve because basic physics says that it should!

Figure 4 – Sea level evolution in North Carolina from proxy data (blue curve with uncertainty range). Local land subsidence is already removed. For more information see here

How do we measure the rise in sea levels? There are two main methods, and a bit like the case for temperatures there are direct measurements using tide gauges and also satellite measurements. However, for the case of satellites the sea level measurements are indeed direct measurements rather than indirect as in the case of temperature. This article explains the techniques used for both surface-based and satellite.

Glaciers

World-wide, the vast majority of the world’s 170,000(+) glaciers are shrinking, a small number are actually growing, but this is due to global warming too! To understand why please see this superb video – it says it all much better than I could possibly describe it.

Frequency of Cold and Warm Nights and Days

This is an interesting one. From time to time, weather stations will record a record high or low temperature. If there were no global warming going on, we would expect that record lows and highs would average out over time. But this is definitely not what we see. What we observe is that record highs are outpacing record lows, and as time goes on, the ratio of record highs to lows is increasing. The following widget shows the current ratio of record highs and lows across the USA. It is updated on a daily basis. It is not possible to have such a large ratio in favour of the record highs unless there has been recent global warming. Please be sure to click on the “Learn More” link on the widget.

Ice Melt

I’ve already covered the melting of Glaciers world-wide and mentioned that melting ice is one contributing factor in the measured rise in sea levels, but there are other indications of a warming planet that can be seen and measured at both poles of the Earth.

Firstly, the Arctic and the Antarctic differ enormously in their makeup. The arctic is a frozen sea surrounded by land, whereas the Antarctic is a frozen continent surrounded by sea. But, there is also a similarity between them that is worth mentioning, and that is the phenomenon called Polar Amplification. In basic terms this means that any change in the net radiation balance (for example greenhouse gas intensification) tends to produce a larger change in temperature near the poles than the planetary average. So, changes such as the amount of ice cover are extremely important, as these effects have positive (bad) feedbacks associated with them. The obvious positive feedback effect here is that ice is bright and reflective which helps to bounce radiation from the sun back into space. However, warming melts the ice, exposing the sea. The sea is darker and absorbs more heat which melts more ice which exposes more sea which warms more and melts more ice – and so it goes on.

The Arctic

Let’s focus on the Arctic first. The extent of the arctic sea ice can easily be photographed and measured by satellites these days. The extent is a two dimensional indication to how far the sea ice covers the sea each year. Obviously there is a seasonal variation with an annual peak in the sea ice extent in the northern winter and a minimum extent at the end of the summer.

However, sea ice extent alone does not reveal the whole picture because even the thinnest ice will be recorded in this metric. What is more revealing is the measurement of the volume of the sea ice. This is much harder to do and there are two main satellite measurement techniques that are used. Firstly, there is altimetry where satellites measure the height of the ice. Incredibly they can detect changes of just a few millimetres from an altitude of around 1000km! Secondly, exquisitely sensitive changes in the gravitational field of the Earth are measured using satellites, notably NASA’s GRACE satellites. This reveals the change in volume of the ice as mass is lost to the oceans. The chart below shows data from GRACE for the case of Greenland and the downward trend in volume is clearly seen.

Figure 6 – The solid blue line is the best-fitting linear trend. T Harig C, Simons FJ. Mapping Greenland’s mass loss in space and time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2012;109(49):19934-19937. doi:10.1073/pnas.1206785109.

The bottom line is that the arctic sea ice volume is reducing and at an increasingly fast rate. This is true even during the years where the sea ice extent grows.

The Antarctic

Climate change deniers like to talk about the Antarctic because the extent of the sea ice surrounding the continent has actually increased in recent years! Surely that can only happen if the Antarctic is cooling, not warming!

As always, the truth is slightly more complicated and, in fact, the increase in the sea ice extent is explained by warming, not cooling! Firstly, the chart below shows that the surface air temperatures over the ice-covered areas of the Antarctic are warming. Also, oceanographic studies reveal that the surface waters of the southern oceans are warming – and at a faster rate that the global average.

Figure 7 – Annual mean surface air temperature averaged over the ice-covered areas of the Southern Ocean. Straight line is trend line (Zhang 2007).

So, how can the increase in Antarctic sea ice extent be explained? I can’t beat this very concise explanation by John Cook from the brilliant website skepticalscience.com

There are several contributing factors. One is the drop in ozone levels over Antarctica. The hole in the ozone layer above the South Pole has caused cooling in the stratosphere (Gillet 2003). A side-effect is a strengthening of the cyclonic winds that circle the Antarctic continent (Thompson 2002). The wind pushes sea ice around, creating areas of open water known as polynyas. More polynyas leads to increased sea ice production (Turner 2009).

Another contributor is changes in ocean circulation. The Southern Ocean consists of a layer of cold water near the surface and a layer of warmer water below. Water from the warmer layer rises up to the surface, melting sea ice. However, as air temperatures warm, the amount of rain and snowfall also increases. This freshens the surface waters, leading to a surface layer less dense than the saltier, warmer water below. The layers become more stratified and mix less. Less heat is transported upwards from the deeper, warmer layer. Hence less sea ice is melted (Zhang 2007).

There are other indicators that point to the fact that the world has warmed over and above what is expected due to natural variations in recent years. I think I have laid out enough evidence in this article to close the case. However, as an exercise for the reader you might like to look into these topics:

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Climate ChangeComments Off on Climate Change for Dummies #2: How do we know that CO2 causes the planet to warm up?

Apr042016

In part 1 of this series, I put forward the evidence on how we are sure that CO2 levels are rising and how we know that human activities are the cause. In this article I show how it is that we know that CO2 causes the planet to warm up. I’ll start with a small rant…

Small Rant

If the Earth, like our satellite the Moon, had no (or very, very little) atmosphere, the temperature measured at its surface would be very much colder than the balmy conditions we enjoy as a species of animal that has evolved on this watery blue jewel of a planet that we call home. And let’s be sure of one thing – this mote of dust that we inhabit, with its fragile and thin atmosphere, is the only place we are ever likely to survive. Why? Because the Universe is a big place, and we will never manage to abandon this oasis of our birth to populate another rock which we may royally fuck-up in a similar manner as we have here. Rant over!

Warmer than theory

If we considered the Earth to be an ideal theoretical ‘blackbody’ then we could calculate that the radiation from the Sun would warm its surface to about 5°C. If you then allow for the fact that the Earth is quite reflective due mainly to its bright oceans, clouds and polar caps, this temperature would drop to a theoretical value of about -18°C. Something here does not add up! The actual, measured average temperature of the Earth is about +14°C, so what is it that causes the Earth to be over 30°C warmer than simple theory predicts?

The answer lies with the atmosphere – the layer of air that extends from the surface of the Earth to the edge of space. It is often said that if the Earth was the size of a bowling ball, then the atmosphere would be only as thick as a coat of varnish, and that is certainly about right, but all our weather happens in this tenuous layer of gases, and this article will explain how certain gases in the air are responsible for raising the temperature.

Isn’t this old news?

You might think that our understanding of the climate is a very recent thing, perhaps in the last few decades, but in fact we have known about the basic mechanisms that drive changes in the climate for well over a century, and the first clue came from the great French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier around 1824. He calculated from the size of the Earth and its distance from the Sun what the temperature should be if the only factor was the heat it receives from the Sun. As mentioned above the answer to this turns out to be rather chillier than it is, but he then went on to suggest that the air might absorb heat rising from the Earth’s surface, preventing it from escaping into space, thus warming the planet. This idea was inspired by earlier experiments carried out by Horace Bénédicte de Saussure, and so Fourier was the first person to describe “the greenhouse effect” (although he didn’t use that term).

The Greenhouse Effect

A quick physics refresher here: All light, be it visible, infrared, ultraviolet, radio, microwave, x-ray or gamma is the same stuff – electromagnetic radiation. The different categories are to do with the wavelength of the light. Wavelength is sort of the inverse of Frequency. The higher the frequency, the higher the energy of the light (and the shorter the wavelength). Talk of wavelength and frequency suggest something is waving, and indeed it is, for light has both magnetic and electrical field components, which are the things that are waving about. When one wiggles it generates the other and vice versa. End of physics lesson.

The greenhouse effect goes like this: The electromagnetic radiation reaching the Earth from the Sun consists mainly of visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. Not all of it reaches the ground, some is reflected back into space before that, but the planet absorbs the energy that does reach the surface and then reradiates it as infrared radiation. You can’t see infrared light with your eyes, but you can feel it on your skin – it’s what we call heat. On the way back up, greenhouse gases absorb the infrared light and reemit it in all directions. Some of it eventually escapes back into space; some goes back down towards the Earth’s surface. The result is a warming in the lower part of the atmosphere – think of it like putting a blanket on at night to keep warm.

Being just a little bit of a pedant about these things, the term “greenhouse effect” is not a bad one, but a glass greenhouse does not keep the air inside it warm for quite the same reason as the so-called greenhouse gasses (GHGs) do, and that’s because the infrared radiation in a greenhouse is trapped by the fact that glass is opaque to infrared radiation (and won’t let it back out), rather than the absorption/re-emission process described above.

GHGs vs. Non GHGs

Before discussing the gases that do contribute to global warming, let’s first look at the other gases that are present in the atmosphere that don’t. This is quite instructive for a couple of reasons which will become apparent.

The air we breathe is mostly made up of Nitrogen (78%), Oxygen (21%) and Argon (0.93%). The rest of the components of (dry) air are present in trace amounts as we will see when we look at GHGs.

Why is it that some molecules are affected by infrared radiation yet others aren’t? Well, it’s complicated, but Nitrogen and Oxygen exist in the atmosphere as N2 and O2 which are known as diatomic molecules (two atoms in the molecule). Argon exists as a monatomic molecule. When these molecules vibrate, there is very little change in the distribution of their electrons and hence very little change in the electrical charge distribution around the molecule. This makes them almost totally unaffected by infrared (IR) radiation – in other words, IR radiation is just not in tune with them; not on their wavelength so to speak.

There are several gases in the air that do contribute to global warming. Before discussing them individually, let’s just explain how it is that these GHG molecules are affected by IR radiation. If you can, imagine a molecule of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) which has one atom of Carbon bound to two atoms of Oxygen. When this molecule is excited by an incoming infrared photon of light, it vibrates and absorbs the photon, and then reemits another photon of IR in a different direction. It just so happens that the frequency that the molecule ‘likes’ to vibrate at is ‘in tune’ with the frequency of infrared radiation; and this is why the IR photons get absorbed. Photons of visible or ultraviolet light, for example, do not cause the molecule to ‘ring’ and are ignored.

A diagram is worth a thousand words and the following animation of a CO2 molecule being excited by a photon of IR radiation is from the UCAR website here

Human-caused climate change deniers (henceforth referred go as ‘deniers’) like to point out how small the contribution of GHGs like CO2 is to the overall makeup of the atmosphere; we just learnt that they are only present in trace amounts (just over 400 ppmv or 0.04% in the case of CO2). They ask “how could such small traces make any difference to the temperature of the Earth?” There are several answers to this, and one is that the greenhouse effect cannot be diluted by the non-GHGs. In other words doubling or halving the percentage of Nitrogen or Oxygen will not have any effect of the ability of the GHGs to absorb and reemit IR radiation. Additionally just because the GHGs are present in trace amounts, and people find it hard to believe they can be dangerous is not a very scientific way of going about things as there are lots of examples of things that humans have trouble imagining that are nonetheless true. For example even 0.000001% of Arsenic in the water supply is considered a danger to Human health.

The Greenhouse Gases

Water vapour (H2O) is the most abundant greenhouse gas and is the biggest contributor to the ‘natural’ greenhouse effect. The amount present in the air varies depending on how ‘wet’ the air is. Water vapour provides us with an example of a bad ‘positive feedback’ in the climate meaning that more of it causes more warming which in turn causes more water vapour to form and so on. Human activity has little direct effect on the abundance of water vapour aside from the fact that warming caused by CO2 emissions causes warming, which causes more moisture, which causes more warming…

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is probably the most important of the GHGs. It has a much longer lifetime in the atmosphere and this can be anything between 30 and just below 100 years (By comparison, water vapour molecules hang around for about 9 days on average). We know for certain that human activities are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Methane (CH4) exists in quantities in the air about 200 times lower than CO2. The thing about methane is that it is a more ‘potent’ GHG than CO2 as it has a higher greenhouse ‘potential’. However, it has a shorter lifetime in the air than CO2 at about 11 years. Methane is currently responsible for about 20% of the non-natural greenhouse effect. It comes from sources such as cattle and drilling for natural gas. Recently there was a huge leak of methane in California which we really could have done without! A big worry with methane is another (bad) positive feedback effect where recent warming is melting the not-so-permafrost in places such as Eastern Siberia, this is venting methane which causes more warming which cause more venting…

The are other GHGs including Nitrous Oxide, Ozone and CFCs, but their impact is not so important as those described above.

The Evidence

To be honest, when I write this stuff, I get to the point where I think that anyone reading this would already be convinced by the story so far. But I’ve only really introduced the science and haven’t presented any evidence of warming or that it is caused by GHGs. Let’s start by thinking about some experiments we could carry out to prove our case.

The first experiment I can think of is some way of looking down at the Earth from space and measuring the amount of radiation that is coming back from the surface. If we could measure the amount at the different wavelengths of light then that would be great. Secondly, it seems sensible to propose that, if the warming is being caused by GHGs in the lower part of the atmosphere, then if we could measure changes in temperature vertically through the atmosphere that would also prove valuable evidence. It turns out, of course, that we can do both these things.

The first experiment has been carried out by satellites orbiting the Earth since 1970. They have been measuring the brightness of the radiation coming back up from the surface at various wavelengths. The chart below from a paper in published in Nature (Harries 2001) shows the change in the brightness over the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum from 1970 compared to 1997. This is a period over which the Earth has been measured to have warmed. The chart shows that the brightness decreases most at the IR wavelengths which are ‘tuned’ to the GHG molecules as described above. Here we can see the decrease due to Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Ozone (O3) and Methane (CH4), plus some other CFC molecules. In a nutshell, the Earth has got slightly dimmer over time in the IR wavelengths as seen from above, because more GHG molecules have held the IR ‘captive’.

The second experiment involves measuring the temperature changes over time at varying heights in the atmosphere. Some useful terminology here: The troposphere is the name for the lower region of the atmosphere covering from ground level up to roughly 18 km. The stratosphere takes over after that and goes on up to about 50 km in altitude (the mesosphere takes over higher than that).

We can easily measure that GHGs are warming the troposphere. We use ground based weather stations and satellites. If the GHGs are preventing some of the IR radiation from leaving the troposphere we would also expect the upper atmosphere to cool over time as the lower atmosphere warms over time. Interestingly, the situation would be reversed if it was the Sun causing the warming.

Fortunately, since 1979 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been operating the Stratospheric Sounding Units (SSUs). These satellites have provided near global stratospheric temperature data above the lower stratosphere. These meaurements clearly show that the stratosphere has been cooling whilst the troposphere has been warming. The chart below is taken from a study by Ramaswamy et al., Reviews of Geophysics, Feb. 2001. The data covers the time perion of 1980 to 1995.

There really is no other convincing way of explaining a cooling in the upper atmosphere whilst the lower atmosphere and surface warms.

Just one more thing. Satellite measurements have detected that the stratosphere is shrinking, this is exactly what you would expect as contraction occurs with cooling.

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Climate ChangeComments Off on Climate Change for Dummies #1: How do we know that recent increases in CO2 levels are man-made?

Mar292016

This is the first blog in a series I intend to write called Climate Change for Dummies.

So, How do we know that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are man-made?

Over the last 150 years or so, the level of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has increased from about 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to over 400 ppmv – that’s an increase of roughly 43%! Before explaining why we are absolutely certain that this increase is due to human activities, let’s quickly look at how scientists have measured this increase over time.

The chart below shows the levels of CO2 measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. You can look this up and even download the measured figures here if you so wish. The red wiggles on the chart are caused by the respiration (breathing) of all the plant life on Earth, and the fact that there are more plants in the northern hemisphere. So, during the northern summer months these plants breathe in more CO2 than average and thus a seasonal cycle (or wiggle) is seen. (Isn’t science wonderful?).

The chart below further illustrates that, in recent years, the rate of increase of CO2 has gone up, and is still going up.

You may be thinking “Hang on a minute, how can anyone just state that the levels of anything are increasing faster than they did over the past several 100,000 years?” A very good question and one that any sceptical person should be asking. The answer lies in the fact that there are other ways of measuring CO2 levels other than having a CO2-level-o-meter on top of a mountain in Hawaii! The trick is to drill ice-cores from ancient ice sheets. I can’t improve on the explanation from the British Antarctic Survey here, and the introductory paragraph from their webpage is as follows:

Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled out of an ice sheet or glacier. Most ice core records come from Antarctica and Greenland, and the longest ice cores extend to 3km in depth. The oldest continuous ice core records to date extend 123,000 years in Greenland and 800,000 years in Antarctica. Ice cores contain information about past temperature, and about many other aspects of the environment. Crucially, the ice encloses small bubbles of air that contain a sample of the atmosphere – from these it is possible to measure directly the past concentration of gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) in the atmosphere.

When this is done (no mean feat I would add) we see that CO2 levels today are not only higher than they have been for a very long time, but they are increasing at a rate faster than at any time in a very long time.

The chart below shows this over the last 400,000 years, but I should add that this has been going on for at least 800,000 years, and probably for more than 1,000,000 years. When you think that modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, you start to put that timeframe into some kind of perspective. Also note that the ‘Current Level’ marker on the chart below (drawn up to 2010) is slightly out of date – today’s CO2 level is over 402 ppmv.

So, we’ve established that CO2 levels are higher and rising faster than in any time in the whole of the history of anatomically modern humans, and beyond!

Incidentally, if you’re curious about why there are regular cycles in the CO2 levels in the above chart then these indicate the coming and going of recent ice ages. We know that Earth’s climate has changed throughout history, and indeed it is by studying the natural changes in the climate that scientists know that the current rate of (human-caused) change is unprecedented. In the last 650,000 years there have been 7 cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era. Human civilisation has blossomed in this current interglacial period. It is not the right place to explain in detail why these cycles occur, but the brief explanation is that they are due to long-term changes in the orbit and tilt of the Earth.

Get to the point!

Now let’s move on and tackle the main point of this article – how is it that we are sure that this increase in CO2 is caused by humans?

Firstly, before we get to the ‘killer’ arguments, let’s just consider the fact that since the industrial revolution, we have been burning fossil fuels and clearing and burning forested land at an unprecedented rate. We know that these activities convert organic carbon into CO2, and we also know that the approximately 500 billion metric tons we have produced is enough to have raised the levels to about 500 ppmv. Why is it then that the current levels are lower and nearer 400 ppmv? The answer lies with the world’s oceans and biosphere which act as ‘carbon sinks’ and end up absorbing some of the CO2 from the atmosphere. However note that we still produce CO2 faster than these sinks can absorb it, and the net effect is the observed increase as shown in the discussion above.

To be quite honest, that should be enough to convince any reasonable person, but there’s more…

It’s all in the isotopes

Carbon comes in several flavours or ‘isotopes’. Most of the elements in the Periodic Table do. The thing that makes a particular element the way it is is the number of protons in its atomic nucleus. Casting your mind back to your ‘O’ level chemistry (at least if you’re British like me) you will know that the atomic nucleus of an element contains the protons and neutrons, with the wispy electrons whirling around the nucleus like planets revolving around a star. The fact that Quantum Physics says that this mental image is completely wrong is neither here nor there – it’ll do for our purposes here. Also, remember that the whole subject of Chemistry (well, pretty well all of it) is explained by the number and arrangement of the negatively charged electrons which balance out the positively charged protons in the nucleus. Therefore, an element can have a varying number of neutrons and still be chemically the same element.

And so it is with Carbon (C) which has three naturally occurring flavours, or isotopic forms namely 12C, 13C and 14C (normally pronounced as “C 12”, “C 13” etc). The numbers come from the total of the number of protons and neutrons, and Carbon has 6 protons and varying numbers of neutrons. 12C is the most common form with 13C making up about 1% and 14C only accounting for about 1 atom in a trillion. 12C and 13C are stable isotopes but 14C is unstable with a half-life of 5,700 years which is why it is extremely useful in dating objects using a technique called Radiocarbon Dating.

The killer argument

It just happens that, during photosynthesis, plants have a preference for the lighter 12C over 13C and so they end up being made up of Carbon with lower ratios of 13C relative to 12C, and since the fossil fuels that we burn are mainly derived from ancient trees and plants, when the CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels is released and mixed into the atmosphere, a lower ratio of 13C/12C is found there also. This means that the isotopic ratio of 13C/12C measured in a sample of today’s atmosphere will be lower than a sample from the past (when less CO2 from fossil fuel burning was mixed into the air).

Another piece of killer evidence comes from studies of the 13C/12C ratio in both tree rings and the bubbles of atmosphere captured in ice cores. Trees lay down the familiar rings that we can count to find out how old a tree is, and the analysis of the material in the rings can tell us what the isotopic ratio in the atmosphere was at the time the ring was formed. It has been found, from tree rings and ice core gas, that at no time in the past 10,000 years is the C13C/12C ratio as low as it is today. Also, this ratio starts to decline at around 1850 AD – which is when CO2 starts to dramatically increase due to the burning of ‘old plants’.

Recent measurements are also showing that the lower 13C/12C ratio is showing up in the surface waters of the ocean and also in the shells and bodies of sponges and corals. This is analogous to the evidence found in tree rings, but it reflects the changes in the chemistry of the oceans rather than in the atmosphere (but remember, the oceans absorb the CO2 in the atmosphere). These measurements also show that the decline in the carbon isotopic ratio started when the activities of the industrial revolution started to pump more CO2 into the air.

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Climate ChangeComments Off on Man-made Climate Change: False Balance in the Press

Mar192016

If you look up the term “False Balance” you will, no doubt, come across the Wikipedia definition. Here is the first sentence from the Wiki article:

“False balance is a real or perceived media bias where journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence actually supports”

To give an extreme example, if an article shows a picture of the Earth from space, we shouldn’t need to hear the views of a spokesman for the flat-earth society about how the picture can be explained, or if we hear about about a new fossil discovery from the Cambrian, we really don’t need to hear from a biblical creationist! Why? Because there is so much evidence for the fact that the Earth is (nearly) spherical, and so much evidence that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old (and not 6,000 years old) that there is no point. If we were to include the views of every spokesperson holding every crackpot belief, we wouldn’t get anywhere, and we would also be guilty of applying “False Bias” to our article.

The situation is the same with climate science. The overwhelming evidence is that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) since the beginning of the industrial revolution (and more specifically since the 1950s) have cause the Earth to warm up. However, there are parts of the press that seem to think that we should give equal weight to the views of climate change deniers as we do to the the scientifically-based views of proper climate scientists. By the way, I’ll use the term “deniers” or “contrarians” rather than “sceptics” because real scepticism is valuable in science and should not be hijacked so easily by those involved in peddling psuedoscience or straightforward denial in the face of a mountain of evidence.

Let’s just get things straight. There is so much evidence for man-made (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW) that it is an indisputable fact. Scientists are as certain of this as they are that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. We should, therefore, be concentrating on the solutions to this, perhaps the greatest challenge ever to face mankind, rather than give air-time to the politically and financially motivated deniers. Additionally over 97% of climate scientists agree with this, and a lot of the minority of contrarians take up their positions because of some sort of overriding political belief system or through their association with lobbying groups funded by the fossil fuel industry.

Does this sound like scientific dogmatism? After all, scientists have been wrong many times in the past, and isn’t it true that great leaps in science have been made by those great radical thinkers who have thought ‘outside the box’ and fought against the established views of their times? Well, yes, but the subject of climate science is all about the measurement and collection of huge amounts of data, and the statistical interpretation of this mass of data. There is no chance for a Newton, or Einstein to come along with a new and radical way of thinking about the subject; the physics is well understood and, contrary to what you might hear from the deniers, climate models are good, and have been so for many years. Climate Sciience is an ongoing process, one that relies on hundreds of dedicated men and women getting out there and applying themselves to the task. The truth is driven our by that great engine of science called the peer-review process. If you’re not sure what that is, see the Wikipedia definition, and here are the first sentences from that definition:

“Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility.”

AGW deniers hate peer-review as their arguments (such as they are) simply fall apart when subjected to the process. Unfortunately they are very successful at spreading their messages no matter how ludicrous they may be. Deniers and contrarians will keep repeating their nonsense well after it has been debunked by real scientists, ethical bloggers and journalists.

Many newspapers and television news outlets will attempt to “balance” the overwhelming scientific viewpoint by also interviewing a climate contrarian to present “the other side.” The problem is that by disproportionately representing the small minority of climate contrarians, a false impression is created among the public that their numbers are greater than they are in reality. Even the BBC fall foul of this, and in fact they are particularly bad at doing so. The fact that they examined their internal practises, found them wanting but then ignored the findings is very disappointing.

Even the process of debugging the myths put about by the deniers can be dangerous unless handled carefully. The very act of making reference to the offending article or programme can draw more attention to it. This is known as the “familiarity backfire effect”.

This is the first time I’ve dabbled with an article on Climate Change in my blog. It’ll probably be my last, as I guess I’ll be the target of much vitriol, get upset, and pull the plug like the sensitive chap I am. However, as I have been passionately concerned about the subject ever since my Green Party days of the 1980’s I thought it was about time I stuck a toe in the water, so here is a small article on a subject that has been eating away at me for several weeks.

With the huge amount of recent publicity following the ridiculous Donald Trump, the rest of the candidates for the US Republican Party can get somewhat overshadowed. We seem to now hear less about Ben Carson and his Christian fundamentalist beliefs than we did, but there is one other candidate for the leadership of the ‘Grand Old Party’ (the GOP) who grabs a huge amount of news (as seen here in Europe, at least), that being the Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. Trump maybe nasty and a racist – stupid even, but Cruz is more dangerous I would say, and definitely not stupid.

It is this intelligence that I want to highlight with regard to the Senator’s incredible stance with regard to Climate Change, and it is also here that similarities to the ex British Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Nigel Lawson become apparent, but more about Baron Lawson of Blaby later, let us first deal with Ted Cruz.

It’s hard to know where to start with just how wide of the mark Senator Cruz is with his ‘beliefs’ on Climate Change. Perhaps reading this article would serve as some sort of primer, but Cruz (incredibly) chairs the Senate’s Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, and back in December 2015 appeared prominently in a meeting devoted to Climate Change where, amongst other things he displayed a graph which he stated proved that “there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years.” You can watch his performance and see the graph here , but my point is that the chart is an example of cherry-picking the data to make a point, and Cruz knows this because, as already mentioned, he is not dumb. (I won’t go into massive detail here, but the cherry-picking includes ensuring that the El Nino enhanced temperature figure for 1998 is shown on the left of the chart, and thus deliberately lessening the real growth in global temperatures seen and measured over the past several decades, which is only explainable by including mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases). I’m guessing also that Cruz must have staff members who prepare these things for him – perhaps advising and coaching him on what to say.

What, therefore, makes a person (and their staff – how can these poeple live with themselves!) knowingly present information in this false and deliberately misleading way? I am certainly unable to imagine the commercial, corporate and political factors that must contribute to the pressures on such a smart man making himself look and sound so ridiculous. Unfortunately, Ted Cruz has a huge following, and that’s what makes him so dangerous (see here for how dangerous he could be). But how does such an educated person manage to internalise and bury the deceit, and convince himself that he is right? I can only assume that this sort of denial of the work of thousands of scientist is akin to the way that the (very) occasional qualified biologist denies the fact of evolution and subscribes to the belief of creationism and that the world is only 6,000 years old!

So, what of Lord Lawson? How can we draw any parallels between the current Senator of Texas, and a Westminster School and Christ Church Oxford educated British politician (obtaining a first class honours degree in PPE) who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government? Surely we couldn’t have picked two more dissimilar people? Well, both are very smart, yet subscibe to incredibly dumb views related to Climate Change! Lawson founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and has ridiculed himself several times by spouting nonsense about Climate Change. Unfortunately the GWPF has the means to represent this nonsense as ‘facts’ in such a way as to convince the more credulous members of the public and also many politicians (who should know better). For a detailed discussion of the utter twaddle that Lord Lawson spouts, I can do no better than to refer you to this immaculately-written blog article by Graham Wayne which really is worth a read.

In summary, you can be both very smart and a dickhead, all at the same time!

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Here are three different versions of M16, The Eagle Nebula in the constellation of Serpens Cauda. Interestingly, the constellation of Serpens is unique in that it is the only one that is split into two distinct pieces, namely Serpens Caput (the head) and Serpens Cauda (the tail). All of these images have been recently taken using the amazing telescope that I co-share with Australian amateur Jason Jennings. This scope is hosted in the iTelescope.net ‘barn’ at the Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. I’ll write another post about the scope soon, but it is an amazing 16″ f/3.5 astrograph.

This first version is a ‘traditional’ LRGB image, meaning it has been made by taking separate images using Clear (Luminance), Red, Green and Blue filters and then combining those to make a final colour image. This should be close to how the eye would perceive the colour because the R,G and B filters pass frequencies of light similar to the sensors in our tri-colour vision system. The clear filter is used as a luminance channel and is where most of the sharpened detail resides.

As with all the images, please click on them to see a full-sized version.

M16 LRGB Version

This next version is taken using three narrowband filters. These are H-Alpha (Ha), OIII and SII. The wavelength of these filters are commonly used by astronomers because there are a lot of emission nebulae that have excited atoms in them that emit light in these wavelengths (especially Ha which is nearly always the strongest). So, to produce an ‘RGB’ image from them requires that they are mapped to the Red, Green and Blue channels of the image. I have chosen to use the ‘Hubble Palette’ which maps the SII to Red, Ha to Green and OIII to Blue. Here is the result:

M16 Narrowband Version

You will notice that the star colours are not good in the narrowband version and this is a consequence of the filter mapping and also because of the relative strengths of the three channels. So, in the third image below, I have combined the stars from the RGB image with the nebulosity from the narrowband image. Here it is:

M16 – NB with RGB stars

I’m not sure which version I prefer!

Finally, a 4th image (I lied!) taken last year with a longer focal length instrument (12″ f/9 RCOS) which shows the ‘Pillars of Creation’ in more resolution. This was also taken using the Hubble Palette which is appropriate because the iconic pillars were made famous by those fabulous images from the Hubble telescope.